A recent report by the U.S. Justice Department's Inspector General may energize an effort to bring top U.S. law enforcement officials to justice for the systematic sweep of hundreds of Arab and Muslim immigrants into detention after Sept.11, Chisun Lee reports in The Village Voice. Some of these former detainees are now suing U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft and others for a host of civil rights violations. "In numerous cases, people not accused of any crime were locked down 23 hours a day, sometimes in solitary confinement, and shackled at the wrists, waist, and ankles when outside their cells," Lee writes. "Some detainees reported afterward that they had been slammed into walls, kicked, and subjected to petty torments like constant bright light during sleeping hours and deprivation of toilet paper and soap."
In its botched expansion, has the ACC "forsaken all it once stood for, selling out to football and TV?" Independent Weekly's Barry Jacobs looks at what the addition of Miami and Virginia Tech will do to the conference that was founded by football boosters but has always been known for its basketball power. "Here we were ... operating in a hostile takeover manner, with greed as the single manifestation of it, and nobody was telling anybody anything," William Friday, retired president of the University of North Carolina system and a leading advocate of athletic reform, tells Jacobs.
As every alternative newspaper publisher knows, it's not easy to move thousands of newspapers every week, especially when distribution points are becoming increasingly difficult to secure. That's why AAN members keep a sharp eye on circulation, watching for erosion, distribution opportunities and threats from the competition. Managers at 11 member papers talked to AAN News about how they keep their numbers steady in a stagnant economy.
Shaka N'Zinga is a well-known prison poet and intellectual. He was Arthur Wiggins, a violent and psychotic teenager, when he was arrested and convicted for the brutal rape and murder of an 18-year-old girl. Baltimore City Paper's Blake de Pastino talks to the Afrocentric anarchist whose recent "breathtakingly ambitious book," A Disjointed Search for the Will to Live, is "all at once the story of his desperate, dead-stoned days on the streets of Baltimore, an invective against the 'insane design' of the white man, a tirade about the failings of capitalism, and, ultimately, a meditation on the lingering hopefulness of human nature."
When Tommy Russo finished college at Chico State at the age of 23, he headed straight to Maui with a truck, a laser printer, two computers and the hope of starting a new weekly newspaper. He got the paper started, but after eight weeks he was broke; it took a last minute advertising contract to keep the presses running. Six years later, Russo has turned Maui Time Weekly from a biweekly focusing on surf culture into a full-fledged alternative paper that each week reaches over 10 percent of the tourists and locals on the island, Ian Houston reports.
Katie Belflower was 17 years old, pale and unpopular, with a reputation for going after other girls' boyfriends. But prosecutors say that once she latched onto Mike Simons, a 20-year-old who was already married to another teenager, she didn't want to let go -- no matter who had to die in the process. East Bay Express staff writer Susan Goldsmith reports, in a story based in part on her exclusive access to videotaped police interviews with the suspects, Belflower and an unlikely pair of accomplices almost got away with one of the most chilling murders ever to haunt the endless East Bay suburbs.
